LEARN2 - Mission 2: What's the biggest food security challenge near you?

Even though my current hometown lies in Germany, I decided to take a look at China's recent food security issues. I personally believe that China's food security challenges are more dominant than those in Germany. Partly because of the much bigger population and partly because of China's rapid development in economy and technology. After ungoing researches online I came across 3 major challenges China has to deal with in the present. I will then give a brief introduction to plant nutriomics. Researches in plant nutriomics aim at innovative solutions for improving plant nutrient efficiency.

Challenges China has to face regarding food security
1. (Obviously) one of the main challenges China has to deal with is to eliminate hunger. With more than 1.3 billion people, China is the world's most populous country. Thus avoiding undernourishment and starvation is one of the government's biggest and most important tasks. In year 2015, China will be one of the very few countries in the world that will have fulfilled the "Millennium Development Goal" of reducing the existence of hunger by 50%. Even so, it is a fact that during 2005 till 2007 undernourishment still affected 130 million people, most of them living in the countryside in central and western regions.

2. The second challenge is that of fullfilling the growing appetite of a population that is becoming richer and more demanding. China enjoys significant increases in the consumption of non staple foods such as meat, fish, fruits, eggs and dairy products. One of the possible reasons is the continuous rise of incomes, especially among rural residents, leading to an intensifying demand for non staple food.

3. The last challenge I'd like to point out is China's growing resource and environmental contraints, inhibiting its pursuit of growth regarding food supplies. Population pressure and urbanization have resulted in the loss of some of the country's best farmland. Since 1990, China has suffered a loss of about 8 million hectares of arable land. An additional challenge is China's serious shortages of water, which are getting worse steadily by the uneven distribution of existing supplies. In particular, Northern China, where much of China's wheat and cotton is produced, is severely deficient in water, thanks to the depletion of surface water supplies.

Plant nutriomics
As mentioned above population pressure and environmental constraints have created great challenges on agriculture in China to explore innovative and effective solutions to its plant nutritional problems. Even though plant nutriomics is still at a rather conceptual stage, several efforts have been made aimed at increasing plant nutrient efficiency through a coordinated project on plant nutriomics. Future studies involving both national and international collaborations are needed in order to develop nutrient-efficient and high-quality crop varieties for China. Detailed article about plant nutriomics in China: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2803557/